


two lovers in a willow bower

by cygnes



Category: Swordspoint Series - Ellen Kushner
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-15
Updated: 2016-11-15
Packaged: 2018-08-31 06:57:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8568664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnes/pseuds/cygnes
Summary: Thea Campion loves Rosemary St Cloud. She knows because she’s been in love before. She knows what it feels like.
Rosemary St Cloud loves Thea Campion. Or she assumes it’s love—she has never felt this way before. And isn’t love supposed to be frightening?





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://manzanas-amargas.tumblr.com/post/129952257180/fic-two-lovers-in-a-willow-bower) on my tumblr, over a year ago. (Backdating it made the fic just totally not appear among my works, which is why I didn't do that.) 
> 
> Warning for dysfunctional relationship stuff, ill-advised magic (or something like it), some blurring of reality with dreams/visions, infidelity.

Thea burns bright like a candle flame. She draws the eye, even dressed in the same back robes as every other student at the university. Rosemary knows she ought to look away. 

She doesn’t.

* * *

Doctor St Cloud is an oddity. She is held up as a paragon of modern scholarship and decried as an example of why women ought not to be magisters. She’s steady but passionate, always tired but tirelessly innovative. 

Thea’s hardly the first to be curious about Doctor St Cloud. But when she catches St Cloud looking back at her, she wonders if she’ll be the last.

* * *

Rosemary doesn’t mean to take Thea Campion (no, _Alexandra Theodosia Campion of Tremontaine_ ) into her bed. The shame of it, realizing who Thea is only afterward, claws something loose in her chest. Rosemary is an alderman’s daughter and that was always status enough when she was a child. It’s different in the city. The woman in her arms owns the very town where she was raised. 

She calls Thea “my lady” when she feels beaten down or when she feels spiteful. Thea hardly seems to notice the difference. Beautiful Thea, whose limbs are twined over with inked ivy—the gift of a notorious lover. Rosemary is a little older; Thea is more worldly by far. This is not surprising. Thea has had all the best of the world at her fingertips since she was born.

But Rosemary has Thea. (For now, for now.) Rosemary has her studies, her students, and her faculty feuds. She has her little corner of the world and it was not given to her: she has taken it for herself. It’s enough for an alderman’s daughter to be proud of. 

* * *

Thea is too like her father. Her mother loves her for it and the rest of polite society keeps a wary distance. Never too far, though—she is a Tremontaine. They can’t afford to shun her completely in case she inherits. No one wants a ducal family as an enemy. The university tolerates her because she has ready money to spend on classes, even if she never manages any rigorous course of study.

“I think I’ll stick with rhetoric,” she mumbles against Rosemary’s breast as she drowses. 

“You couldn’t do ancient history now, anyway,” Rosemary says. “It would be a conflict of interest.” She runs a hand absently down Thea’s bare side. Rosemary has capable square-palmed hands that Thea admires aesthetically as well as for the way Rosemary uses them. Thea has always been complimented on her own hands, which are tapered and long-fingered. They have been praised for their elegance. (Her father’s hands, like she has her father’s eyes and her father’s unsteadiness.) Rosemary’s hands are not elegant but they are beautiful.

“I’m good at rhetoric,” Thea says. “And it’ll be useful, someday. More useful than metaphysics or astronomy.”

“Do you mean to become a writer?” Rosemary says. “You could write me a ballad.”

“I just mean it’s good to know how to manipulate language, since that’s most of what I’ll be doing in life,” Thea says. She is more awake now. She wants Rosemary to do something more exciting with her beautiful hands, so she arches into the slow, light touch. “Once I’m on the Council.”

Rosemary’s hand stills for a moment. “Of course, my lady,” she says. “How could I forget?” Thea is suddenly self-conscious, and thinks about making an apology. She doesn’t know how she ought to feel about her family but she knows that bringing it up now was a mistake, when she’s in Rosemary’s small room, in Rosemary’s creaking bed. Rosemary, who works to pay for the wood burning in the grate.

She doesn’t apologize, though, because Rosemary distracts her with that fluent mouth and those capable hands that Thea so admires.

* * *

It would be convenient to blame the book, or ancient mages and monarchs, but Rosemary’s passion for Thea has run too hot and too close for longer than that. Her love is consuming. She’s not usually so jealous—but she has never felt this way before, not with any other lover. Thea makes her possessive, possessing with ungentle hands. Thea makes her crave mastery.

Rosemary’s love for Thea makes her feel a monster. 

* * *

If Thea sometimes feels smothered or confined in Rosemary’s embrace, it does not frighten her. If Rosemary holds her too tightly, it makes her feel secure. It makes her feel cherished. Ysaud had made her feel desired. This is not the same thing. Rosemary’s love runs deeper. It is not in the flesh, but the blood. 

Thea’s flesh craves Lord Randall but her blood does not. Her heart does not.  

* * *

Thea comes in wearing a man’s signet ring and Rosemary can’t bring herself to be surprised. Oh, she can be angry (she can be furious) but she can’t be surprised. This is how it was always going to end. Thea was going to be married and Rosemary would be left with her books. Rosemary would have the ancient kings and queens that had stirred her passion before, and she would have to be content to be satisfied with that.

But she cannot be satisfied anymore. She has tasted the blood of those kings and queens in Thea’s sweat, every magnificent dead monarch resurrected in her lover. And now she will have the truth, whether or not she wants it.

“You don’t know me,” Thea says. Her almond-shaped eyes are narrowed and hard. “Not at all.”

“That is a lie, my lady,” Rosemary says. “It is unbecoming. You shouldn’t lie to me.” It is her calm certainty, more than anything else, that feeds the wildness in Thea’s expression. But Rosemary cannot rouse herself to raise her voice. She is too sure of herself and of what hangs between them.

“Why do I owe you more truth than I owe anyone else?” Thea snarls. “My life is my own! You don’t own me.”

“You are mine as I am yours,” Rosemary says steadily. “Haven’t you said so? Or did you think that was to be taken lightly? We are bound to one another now in word and blood.” Thea shakes her head, disbelieving. But in her heart, she must know it as Rosemary herself knows it. She must. “I’ve studied you, Thea. I’ve studied you as much as I have the sources for my book—”

“That’s the problem!” Thea cries out. The hand with the ring on it is clenched into a fist and shaking. She is fearful, horror-struck, carrying her own anger and the anger Rosemary is too numb to feel.  “You’ve studied me. You haven’t seen me as I am. You’ve seen someone else—your dead queens! They were all you ever cared about. You only ever saw them when you looked at me. _That_ was what you loved. And I was a fool to love you.” There are tears in Thea’s eyes. She will not let them fall. Rosemary wants to fold her in her arms, kiss away the damp at the corners of her eyes. But the time for that is past. Thea’s heart is breaking, and it wounds Rosemary to know she is the cause, even as the knowledge that she has the power to hurt someone like Thea burns low under her ribs. It feels like satisfaction. It feels cruel. It feels necessary.

“I do love you,” Rosemary says. 

They part. They will meet again.

* * *

All her life, Thea has had dreams of the forest. A willow grove, a still pool of water reflecting the night sky and a face not her own. More than once she has woken from the dream of the willows, feeling branches brush her face, to find Rosemary leaning over her. The branches were not branches, but the curled ends of Rosemary’s long hair.

(Or were they both? Could they be both?)

* * *

Rosemary is going mad or Rosemary is doing magic. It does not matter which, she thinks. There is no going back.

When she casts _The Spelle of the Great Tryal_ she feels like a guttering candle flame. It is suddenly very clear to her that one of them, she or Thea, may die because of it. She hopes it will not be Thea.


End file.
